Floppy disk: Encyclopedia II - Floppy disk - Floppy killers

Floppy disk - Floppy killers

Through the early 1990s a number of attempts were made by various companies to introduce newer floppy-like formats based on the now-universal 3½-inch physical format. Most of these systems provided the ability to read and write standard DD and HD disks, while at the same time introducing a much higher-capacity format as well. There were a number of times where it was felt that the existing floppy was just about to be replaced by one of these newer devices, but a variety of problems ensured this never took place. None of these ever reached the point where it could be assumed that every current PC would have one, and they have now largely been replaced by CD burners and USB flash drives.

The main technological change was the addition of tracking information on the disk surface to allow the read/write heads to be positioned more accurately. Normal disks have no such information, so the drives use the tracks themselves with a feedback loop in order to center themselves. The newer systems generally used marks burned onto the surface of the disk to find the tracks, allowing the track width to be greatly reduced.

As early as 1988 Brier Technology introduced the Flextra BR 3020 which boosted 21.4 MB (marketing, true size was 21,040 KiB, 25 MiB unformatted). Later the same year it introduced the BR3225 which doubled the capacity. This model could also read standard 3½-inch disks.

Apparently it used 3½-inch disks standard disks which had servo information embedded on them for use with the Twin Tier Tracking technology.

In 1991 Insite Peripherals introduced the "Floptical", which used an infra-red LED to position the heads over marks in the disk surface. The original drive stored 21MiB, while also reading and writing standard DD and HD floppies. In order to improve data transfer speeds and make the high-capacity drive usefully quick as well, the drives were attached to the system using a SCSI connector instead of the normal floppy controller. This made them appear to the operating system as a hard drive instead of a floppy, meaning that most PC's were unable to boot from them. This again adversely affected adoption rates.

Insite licenced their technology to a number of companies, who introduced compatible devices as well as even larger-capacity formats. Most popular of these, by far, was the LS-120, mentioned below.

In 1994 Iomega introduced the Zip drive. Not true to the 3½-inch form factor, hence not compatible with the standard 1.44 MB floppies, it became the most popular of the "super floppies" and is included here for completeness. It boasted 100 MB, later 250 MB, and then 750 MB of storage and came to market at just the right time. Zip drives gained in popularity for several years, but never reached the stage of widespread use.

Announced in 1995, the "SuperDisk" drive, often seen with the brand names Matsushita (Panasonic) and Imation, had an initial capacity of 120 MB (120.375 MiB) using even higher density "LS-120" disks. It was subsequently upgraded ("LS-240") to 240 MB (240.75 MiB). Not only could the drive read and write 1440 KB disks, but the last versions of the drives could write 32 MB onto a normal 1440 KB disk (see note below). Unfortunately, popular opinion held the Super Disk disks to be quite unreliable, though no more so than the Zip drives and SyQuest Technology offerings of the same period. This again, true or otherwise, crippled adoption.

Sony introduced their own floptical-like system in 1997 as the 150 MiB Sony HiFD. Although by this time the LS-120 had already garnered some market penetration, industry observers nevertheless confidently predicted the HiFD would be the real floppy-killer, and finally replace floppies in all machines. However, after only a short time on the market the product was pulled as it was discovered there were a number of truly terrible performance and reliability problems that made the system essentially unusable. Sony then re-engineered the device for a quick re-release, but then extended the delay well into 1998 instead and increased the capacity to 200 MiB while they were at it. By this point the market was already saturated by the Zip disk, and it never really had much of a market.

Little is known about this device except that it surfaced early in 1998 as the it drive, and provided 144 MB of storage while also being compatible with the standard 1.44 MB floppies. It was slower than the competitors, but cheaper, media running about $8 at introduction and $5 soon after.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Floppy killers", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki